SHOAH: The New Permanent Exhibition

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Block 27

Message from Elie Wiesel

Open your eyes, visitor, and gather your inner strength; what you will see here may put your mental sanity and moral quest in peril.

You will see here all that cannot be seen anywhere else: the infinite ability of tormentors and also their victims' endless agony.

How could human beings first imagine then commit such inhuman actions against other human beings? Is it that here it was human to be inhuman?

In this place of ultimate malediction, the human condition entered its ultimate metamorphosis, with the enemy inventing new ways of torment, torture and murder, unprecedented in recorded history.

More than one-and-a-half million Jewish children were murdered during the Shoah together with their grandparents; some of them were thrown in ditches of flames and burned alive.

Selections, hunger, humiliation, crematoria: in this place evil attained the dimension of damned divinity – its killers came from prestigious institutions and families whereas their victims were sons and daughters of an ancient people, the only one of Antiquity that survived Antiquity.

Not all victims were Jewish in this place, but all Jews were victims.

Those masses who were brought here from all over occupied Europe and were not annihilated upon arrival, found themselves in a universe parallel to ours today, with its scientists and laborers, believers and non-believers, theoreticians and artists, poets and merchants, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, speaking all languages and practicing all trades. In this place one witnessed an antinomian ingathering of the exiled. Death in gas chambers replaced Redemption.

Open your heart, visitor. And your mind. And your soul. As you walk through the exhibition "SHOAH" and are enveloped by the sights and sounds of the past, hear the voices of the victims, see the drawings of the children, touch the names of the murdered. Be this place's messenger. Take with you a message that only the dead can still give the living: that of remembrance.